ESU professor suspended for comments made on Facebook page

Friday

Feb 26, 2010 at 12:01 AM

EAST STROUDSBURG — An East Stroudsburg University sociology professor has been suspended for venting her workplace frustration on her Facebook page. Gloria Gadsden said she had been put on paid leave indefinitely following a meeting with a dean and university administrators Wednesday afternoon.

DAN BERRETT

EAST STROUDSBURG — An East Stroudsburg University sociology professor has been suspended for venting her workplace frustration on her Facebook page.

Gloria Gadsden said she had been put on paid leave indefinitely following a meeting with a dean and university administrators Wednesday afternoon.

They cited two comments she posted on Facebook, the popular social networking site, she said.

In the first, posted Jan. 21, Gadsden wrote, "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day..."

Five comments followed the message, suggesting those to whom she was linked understood the joke. One said she was "ROFL," shorthand for "rolling on the floor laughing."

In the other comment, posted one month later, Gadsden wrote, "had a good day today, DIDN'T want to kill even one student :-). Now Friday was a different story."

She later removed that comment, she said.

At Wednesday's meeting, she said the dean asked her what she was thinking, and suggested the comments posed a threat. She said officials referred to the fatal shooting earlier this month of three people at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, allegedly by a disgruntled professor, Amy Bishop.

Gadsden, who only recently started her Facebook account, has 32 "friends," including friends, relatives and colleagues. She said she has no students among her Facebook friends. She was unsure how her messages wound up at ESU's provost's office.

She said she had no record of violence, telling officials: "I understand you guys are sensitive but there's no way I'm a threat."

The meeting ended. Ten minutes later, the dean, accompanied by a security guard, put her on leave, she said.

"It's absolutely amazing," said Gadsden, who joined the faculty of ESU as an associate professor in 2005. She added that she was concerned about her 170 students in the five classes she teaches.

Gadsden also said the Facebook-based suspension had roots in a 2008 incident, when she published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that was critical of what she saw as inadequate efforts to retain minority faculty on university campuses.

In that essay, Gadsden, who is black, cited poor treatment by students at several campuses where she'd worked.

She said one student called her "the N-word while passing me in the hall," while another threw something at her as she went to her car, among other examples.

"I was trying to be very careful and not mention any names of institutions," she said of the essay. "I was really writing about a larger issue that a number of institutions have. ... I was never suggesting it was just ESU or anything like that."

Gadsden said the letter resulted in three sometimes tense meetings — one with ESU's president and two with top administrators. They proposed forming a committee to reach out to faculty of color, but nothing happened, she said. She also said the letter sparked other tensions internally.

A university spokesman could not discuss the details of the dispute because it was a personnel issue, but he did say that ESU could not monitor what staff and faculty post on private Web sites — nor that it should seek to do so.

"When we see that something is inappropriate or dangerous we address it as best as we can," said ESU spokesman Doug Smith. "To stop it beforehand, I don't know if it's possible or worth our time or effort. And it smacks of a First Amendment right, to some degree."

The Facebook incident also points out how our off-hand musings cannot be considered private in the age of social networking, said Montana Miller, an assistant professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who is an expert on Facebook.

"There is no longer really a boundary between off-campus and on-campus, or personal and professional — all because of Facebook," Miller said.

She added that users' ability to post frequently on social networking sites gives them the feel of oral expression, even though these comments are actually published material that can be preserved, spread beyond the intended audience and interpreted in ways users never intended.

It's easy to offend someone — even if a user tries to be attentive to etiquette.

"Facebook is one big open mouth and, at every turn, we put a foot in it," Miller said.

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